Steve PMHGuitarZoom is a guitar teaching website that seeks to bridge the gap between traditional music instruction with an in-person teacher and the online model that emphasizes individual learning through practicing lessons with less direct feedback and instruction.
Through teacher Steve Stine’s work, you can learn guitar on his website, after getting some basics from his free YouTube tutorials.
But is GuitarZoom a good way to learn guitar? We’re going to go through their site and find out.
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Find Out on YouTube
Steve Stine’s instruction starts with his YouTube channel, Steve Stine Guitar Lessons.
Billing himself as the world’s most sought-after guitar instructor, his YouTube channel is designed to give the aspiring student a quick introduction to how he teaches and what his lessons will be like.
The YouTube channel includes hundreds of videos that range from instruction to advertisement and equipment review, like many other guitar YouTube channels.
Once this is done, the student is enticed to peruse GuitarZoom.com and sign up for lessons on the website.
Like most instructors, Steve Stine focuses on teaching guitar techniques to play blues and rock music.
If you’re interested in classical guitar, there are some videos here for you, in particular videos on fingerpicking and ear training.
But the focus is on rock and blues, which is completely understandable as these are by far the two most popular genres to new players.
Stine’s technique focuses, as many instructors do, on unlocking the fretboard and using the CAGED system.
GuitarZoom’s videos focus on all aspects of rock guitar, from the basics of chord shapes and moving across the fretboard with confidence to music theory and composition.
If you want to unlock your potential as a songwriter, GuitarZoom will help.
What’s Free?
Unlike some guitar instruction websites (I’m looking at you, Fender Play), GuitarZoom starts the student with a free overview of its content, with some 30 lessons available for free instantly that are yours to keep forever.
This starts at the point of signing up for the website and creating an account before any form of credit card info has been exchanged.
The advantage to this is fairly obvious: You can try out the site and see if Steve Stine’s instructional methods click with your style of learning, without the advertorial content of YouTube.
Through his 30-lesson tutorial, Stine lets you get accustomed to his site’s interface, work with how he answers questions and moves you through the material, and of course, learn some riffs and songs.
The free content totals about four hours of lessons in 5- to 10-minute videos that constitute the complete beginner course through his website.
Giving students the opportunity to try the content before buying is helpful, even if most of his content can be found on YouTube without serious difficulty or delay.
Overall, the tutorial is nice to have but it’s not a killer app for the website.
Signing up for the site is relatively painless for anyone who’s used to modern ecommerce solutions.
The payment processing works with minimal intervention and appears to be as secure as anything else around the web.
It’s only a monthly (or annual) payment between you and the full content of this website, which amounts to hundreds of hours of instruction. Not bad.
No Fluffing Around
On the website GuitarZoom.com, the lessons are interspersed smartly with explanatory content and ways to convert the lessons into music through Masterclasses on different songwriting and guitar skills topics.
This is a little similar to websites like MasterClass, Wondrium, or SkillShare, but is exclusively focused on guitar instruction.
For people who have spent their lifetime wanting to play guitar but have not had the right instructors around, or who live a long way from a guitar shop, websites like GuitarZoom can be a godsend.
The downside to sites like GuitarZoom is the lack of ability to do things like jam lessons with the instructor.
Some of my biggest moments of learning on guitar were through spending time just jamming and riffing with my instructors, learning the fretboard through doing and bonding with another person over shared love of music.
Learning through a website can feel fairly sterile compared to that, and although Stine seeks to address that gap between the instructor and the student, it still remains.
Office hours are harder to handle when you can’t be there directly asking the teacher questions.
GuitarZoom Features
With access to over 65 courses and 150 masterclasses, GuitarZoom focuses on the relationship of student to teacher, in much the way that an in-person instructor would.
Stine’s style is designed to be personable and approachable, approximating the way an in-person instructor would interact with his students, answering questions and assigning homework in each lesson.
Without doing the homework and learning the lesson material, the student presumably will not advance through the lessons and learn the harder material adequately, since guitar, like most motor-skill-related subjects, requires building a fundamental base before graduating to more advanced topics.
A particular favorite of mine is his video series on the CAGED system.
Even if I have a hard time pushing my fingers into the right shapes for CAGED chords, the videos at least make me feel confident I’m on the right track for unlocking that particular technique in the near future.
GuitarZoom’s instructor style makes it feel like these techniques are accomplishable and closer than ever to mastery.
This makes it feel personally like a very successful site, and Stine as a very approachable person despite my interaction with him being primarily through video.
FAQs
Reminders? What Reminders?
When you join a subscription-based instructional website, it may be easy to get inundated with email reminders.
That’s true for GuitarZoom as well.
Email reminders are great for most people – they tend to come once a day, usually at a time when you can either pay attention to them, or when they’ll add to the email inbox that you’ll read through at the end of the day.
If you can put things that are important but not urgent in their proper prioritization-related place, you’ll be well served by this setup.
If not, you may have problems, like a website subscription that drains your bank account month after month with little real benefit.
Make sure that you check in with GuitarZoom at least a couple times a week for new lessons to continue your guitar journey.
How About an App?
The good news is, GuitarZoom has an app. The app is set up as a mobile interface for the website, serving web content over your phone.
Since most web videos are presented in landscape mode, you’ll be turning your phone on its side for most of the video content or squinting at a smaller-than-necessary window.
Also good news, GuitarZoom has both an Android and an iPhone app, providing both of the major phone operating systems with guitar lesson content.
What About the Alternatives?
There are several alternatives to GuitarZoom.
TrueFire, endorsed by Keith Williams of the YouTube channel Five-Watt World, is one of the better lesson alternatives available online, with content and live sessions intermixed, but is criticized for doing less to teach songs than sites like GuitarZoom.
TrueFire has a huge variety of guitar lessons, however, with over 50,000 to choose from, most from acclaimed teachers and instrumentalists.
GuitarZoom is definitely a more budget-friendly option, however, with an annual subscription rate a little less than TrueFire’s.
TrueFire has an advantage in its monthly rate, however.
Fender Play is a popular lesson-delivery service offered by guitar manufacturer Fender and is the only lesson service currently available directly from an instrument manufacturer in the guitar space.
Fender Play uses a “for beginners” model – there is relatively little content at the intermediate level and none for advanced students other than learning how to play popular and traditional songs.
It does have an advantage in that it includes bass guitar and ukulele instruction in the same package with guitar music, and Fender Play is one of the cheapest options.
However, if your desire lies other than in rock, pop, and blues, Fender Play has little content for you.
Fender Play also both benefits and suffers from having a very wide variety of instructors teaching its lessons, so if you find a song you really like from an instructor you vibe with, it might be hard to find other songs from that band by that same instructor.
On the plus side, the wide variety of instructors for Fender Play means that if you have one who just is rubbing you the wrong way, you can always avoid them.
Fortunately, single-site instructors post a lot of videos on YouTube, making it easy to find out if you vibe with that site’s instructor before you sign up.
Make sure you check out Steve Stine’s videos on YouTube before you decide to sign up for GuitarZoom, to make sure that he’s the guy for you.
A similar instructor-driven website is MartyMusic.com, the web headquarters of YouTuber Marty Schwartz.
Versus GuitarZoom, Marty Music has a similar personality-driven instructional style, and plenty of YouTube tutorials to get the aspiring student used to Schwartz’s style of playing before diving in.
With Marty Music, you pay by the course, with the courses unlocked forever once purchased.
Generally speaking, though, Marty Music is considered to be more of a YouTuber than a website instructor, and his instructional style works best through YouTube.
GuitarZoom is overall considered to be somewhat in the middle of the pack in terms of instructional value, below competitors like GuitarTricks.com, JamPlay, and GuitarGate, but above sites like Fender Play.
Its value for money proposition is better than Fender’s offering, but not as good as many others, and is heavily dependent on how engaging you find the instructor, Steve Stine.
If you’re a fan of Stine’s instructional style, you’ll likely get a lot out of GuitarZoom. But if you’re a current fan of Stine, you are probably already signed up for his course.
Subscription Model Blues
GuitarZoom works on monthly and annual subscription models, making it easy to handle for anyone who’s used to website subscriptions.
When you’re subscribing to a website, it’s important to make sure that you write down on your calendar the day that your subscription renews, because it can be a painful surprise to stop using the website and learn a day too late that you forgot to cancel your subscription and now you’re on the hook for another month.
Alternately, use the monthly subscription (discounts can be helpful with this) and remember to cancel if you’re not using it right away.
The benefits of having monthly subscription control can definitely outweigh the inconvenience of having to pay a little more for your overall subscription.
Pros
- GuitarZoom’s lessons are entirely taught by its instructor/owner, Steve Stine. If you vibe with Stine’s instructional methods, you will be happy to take the lessons from the website.
- Pricing is pretty reasonable overall for this website, with an annual subscription cost firmly in the middle of the pack.
- Stine’s lessons teach music theory in an approachable, easy way. You’ll have an easy time handling how he teaches you basics like scales and arpeggios.
Cons
- The email botherware on this site seems a bit extreme.
- Site is only in the middle of the pack in terms of guitar-focused lesson sites.
- Interface can be a little clunky.
- Other single-instructor sites have a lot more free content available.
The Verdict
If you’re looking to learn how to play the guitar, and don’t mind getting your lessons online, you can do a lot worse than GuitarZoom.
Its easy interface and strong, bite-sized lessons make learning guitar an enjoyable and relatively pain-free experience.
If you’ve had problems with sites like Fender Play, GuitarZoom is the antidote.
But spend some time perusing Steve Stine’s free lessons on YouTube to make sure you can stick with his instructional methods long-term, because some users have reported difficulty getting unsubscribed from the site, and if you’re paying on a monthly model the subscription cost is a bit spendy.
👉 Check the Price of GuitarZoom
